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He is now denying the validity of dna tests. I don’t want to say the past 35 years of having him treat me worse than he treats his sister had anything to do with his assumptions of my dna, but he was upset to learn that I am more Irish than him. I wonder what he thought of my mother before these results…
The only way I would touch these DNA tests is if I was somehow assured that it was completely anonymous and would be shredded as soon as I've seen it.
They literally turn around and sell your data, grouped along with others, to whoever wants it, and then get hacked and lose personal info. Hot mess.
They also sell it along with personally identifying inform information to your health insurance provider and the government. It's quite bullshit and should be illegal.
I've heard before that there is a tendency of these tests to over-report European ancestry and under-report or misidentify ethnic minorities. Something to do with the underlying datasets not being inclusive enough because those populations are smaller and don't purchase these DNA tests at the same rate as Western Europeans.
There also seems to be a weird fetishisation of First Nations ancestry in parts of the US. I've also been told I have Cherokee ancestors, but it didn't show in my dna ancestory either.
I was also told our family was part Cherokee. It's apparently a super common claim
I'm struggling to process that this is so common... Also had this in my family growing up
I'm up in northern Ontario in Canada and I had a French Canadian neighbor who loved watching John Wayne movies. He often told me that he had Cherokee ancestry too.
I told him a hundred times that this wasn't Cherokee territory because I was full blooded Ojibwe Cree from this area and we had never heard of Cherokee. I kept telling him that he was probably part Ojibwe or Algonquin which is who the French mixed with in our area .... but he really wanted to be a John Wayne movie Indian.
That's hilarious!
Mixed race / olive skinned people trying to find something more acceptable in order to avoid being outcast. Also, edgelords.
You hear it so much that frankly when I hear it I assume they're lying. Like it's become that stereotype.
My mother always claimed that some amount of greats-grandmother was a Cherokee princess, but I've always thought it was bunk.
Definitely bunk because there were no Cherokee princesses. Could still have some sort of Native American ancestry but that whole Cherokee Princess thing was so overused at one point that it became a trope.
It's unstated racism.
If someone in your past could get a good tan, it was common to say that they were part "< insert native american tribe from your area>" because you definitely didn't want to be perceived as part black.
Look up the "one-drop rule".
I'm sure that was a factor in many of these instances. That said in our family my impression was it was more of a "here's something special about us" type thing, like there's nothing otherwise noteworthy.
That's generally how these things are always communicated to later generations. 😂
I have documented ancestry of Choctaw, card and everything, but my genetic test show 0%. The blood amount is quite low at 1/128
This could be because of the way genes work, roll the dice enough time and there are no genes left. On the other hand many Native Americans are not keen on giving away genetic data after their history with the US.
I'm not saying you are or aren't part native American, but genetic tests are limited.
You're probably aware of this monument to the Choctaw in Ireland but in case you aren't....
Wiki page with the detail and reason. We will never forget.
That'd be seven generations back. For me that'd be in the late 1700s. Did they keep records for that back then?
I'm honestly not sure, I'd need to talk to my family, since they know much more about it than me.
Almost like race is a bs social construct and we are all human who deserve to be treated well
...almost
Inheritance is random
My favorite way to resolve method ambiguities.
Not surprising. My mother was told by her mother that one of her great grandmothers was full blooded native (no specific tribe) which would make me 1/16 native. DNA showed 0% and one my mother took showed 0% for her. She chalked it up to her mother being nuts but it is a fairly common American family myth.
Yeah, I had one of these in my family as well. I didn't do the DNA test but went on ancestry and kinda pieced stuff together way back to when the majority of the family tree crossed over the Atlantic. There's maybe one or two people that are suspect (orphan like circumstances). I can't follow their trees or place them but I don't have strong confidence either of them were the missing Native American. It's made harder by the common practice of making Native Americans take more English names.
I do wonder if the DNA testing could get it wrong in any case. There are so few Native Americans still alive to collect the DNA and really get a picture of "this is what Native American DNA looks like." There were a lot of Native American nations before Europeans showed up ... and a lot were driven to near extinction between smallpox and war.
I'm also the only man I know that's got an effectively hairless chest naturally despite a lot of hairy European lineage... That's been linked to Native Americans (or was at least more common) so maybe there is something to the stories. I don't particularly want to take a DNA test to see what it would say.
In my case the story was definitely believable when I was younger. My grandmother and one of her sisters were orphaned and sent to a workhorse because my great grandparents could not afford them. I used to think my grandmother did not know her parents but using ancestry.com my mom connected with someone who she thought was simply a family friend growing up but turned out to be her cousin from her aunt who was not orphaned. Going through my ancestry, there is almost certainly nobody who is native. Grandma may have been a little nuts (one of the caregivers beat her do bad that she lost an eye so being a little nutty is fairly understandable).
Good point on few data points for native Americans. Many of them stay the fuck away from DNA testing nowadays so I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Knew a pastor who this happened to. He was adamant that he was part Native American. After a DNA test it turned out he was zero percent Native American.
He was big enough to embrace it, tho
He wasn’t a pastor in tribal land, was he? That would have been awkward.
I’m just glad I was never awarded any scholarship based upon being Native American. How bad would it have been if I had traced my supposed heritage to the point of applying for one of those tribal citizenship cards? That would have been humiliating!
Sorta depends on the tribe I think. At least for me, my grandfather has his card (Choctaw) and that was the only requirement for me. My DNA test showed something like 0.1% native.
There are lots of tribal card carrying natives who wouldn't test positive for native ancestry on a DNA test. The tribes don't even use these tests, they require you to prove ancestry with birth and death certificates from yourself back to someone listed on the final rolls. At least that's how my tribe works. That guarantees that you are in-fact an ancestor, and doesn't depend upon tests whose accuracy has been disputed.
He sounds abusive. Dna tests or not. You need to get out of there.
Curious on how they separate between Norway and "Sweden & Denmark". Seems like an odd grouping as arguably Norway have closer ties to both Sweden and Denmark than they do together.
I know, right? How odd. I guess Sweden and Denmark must share some genetics that other countries don’t share.
The worse parts of the Scandinavian genetics no doubt (no bias)
I’m gonna do you a solid on this one, ghost face, and allow you to scalp this dude.
Get one from a different company, you'll get different results.
I have. They’re pretty much the same.
That's funny, when I took a DNA test it just said I was 100% that bitch.
Edit: posted wrong, meant to reply to post, not comment.
Sprinkle in a small amount of Russian and we're cousins!
What I think would be cool and novel would be for a European person to claim Indigenous American heritage. Flip the script.
We don't do that here.